As leaders from many religious traditions across Texas, we affirm the fundamental importance of access to safe and affordable healthcare for women. The freedom to decide when to have children is essential to women’s health, individual rights and family stability in our state. Policies that restrict or deny access to contraception undermine our common spiritual commitment to these basic liberties.

We believe decisions about birth control are appropriately made by individuals — not employers or the government. In order to protect religious freedom and individual conscience, we believe institutions that employ and serve the general public should not be allowed to deny individuals access to — or coverage of — contraception by asserting religious reasons.

United in these common convictions, we call on our state leaders to:

Support policies that ensure adequate funding and broad availability of birth control, especially for low- and moderate-income women.

Uphold policies that protect an individual’s ability to access birth control according to her or his own conscience or religious beliefs.

Texas Religious Leaders Support
Access to Birth Control

* UPDATE:
More than 370 Texas religious leaders have signed the statement. See the full list of signers below.

The ability for women in Texas to access basic preventive healthcare services — including contraception and family planning — has been under attack recently. Far too often religious voices have supported these attacks or remained silent while politicians made decisions that damaged women’s health and eroded individual rights.

Enough is enough. Now religious leaders from a wide range of faith traditions in Texas are speaking out in support of access to these crucial services.

As members of the advisory board for this effort, we invite religious leaders from around the state to join us by adding their names to a statement supporting access to birth control. The statement appears in the box to the right.